Read this article about how to make your manuscript stand out.
By: Denise Drummond Hayes, MSN, RN, CRNP, Senior Clinical Editor, Journals & Special Projects and Chloe Falivene, MA, Associate Editor, Nursing2017 Critical Care
Writing for publication can be a challenge. Each journal has slightly different requirements, targets a different audience, and takes a specific approach tailored to their readers. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to make writing for Nursing2017 Critical Care as straightforward as possible, and our editors work closely with you to bring each article to publication. But as an author, how do you make your manuscript stand out? Here’s what we’re looking for.
Each submission should provide clinically relevant information for practicing nurses working in acute and critical care environments. We want our content to help nurses practice to the full extent of their education and training in an increasingly complex healthcare system. Everything we publish has to meet a specific level of rigor; we look for manuscripts that address current nursing concerns, help refine clinical judgment and critical thinking skills, and address gaps in nursing knowledge.
Ideally, your manuscript incorporates evidence-based guidelines for the care of the patient with multiple comorbidities. The paper should include up-to-date information to optimize patient outcomes in challenging healthcare environments; we ask that all authors use exclusively professional references, no older than three to five years, unless the information referenced is considered landmark research in the field.
Features
Most of our submissions are feature-length articles, which range anywhere from 1,500 to over 3,000 words, so consider length when writing your paper. The articles published in our journal focus on a specific area of practice—whether that’s a procedure, therapy, or guideline—with the goal to provide focused, organized, educational content that our readers can readily translate into practice. These features include components such as abstracts and keywords that help elevate the content and make our online archives more searchable to promote and expand the nursing knowledge base.
Departments
As journal editors, we look for articles that can be used in our various departments. These submissions tend to be shorter (anywhere from 500 to 2,000 words) but address critical aspects of nursing practice in a more focused way.
For our Heart Beats column, our most clinically rigorous, we welcome articles on any cardiovascular topic related to critical care nursing. Recent topics have included the significance of T-wave inversion, drug-induced long QT syndrome, and novel therapies for heart failure.
Our Innovations in Practice articles each describe a change in practice spearheaded by nurses to correct, solve, or improve an identified problem. Innovations authors are usually excited to share their most successful intervention, newest educational initiative, or quality research. If you are submitting an innovations article, please make sure your paper conforms to the appropriate EQUATOR guidelines for health research to best disseminate nursing research findings to a wider audience.
Professional Enrichment covers the nonclinical aspects of nursing, such as career advancement, mentoring, and professional issues. These articles aim to help nurses take a leadership role in critical care areas to help meet the demands of our changing health care system. They also help nurses make an optimal contribution to healthy work environments, and take responsibility for their professional growth by focusing in on leadership and career-building skills.
Our Tech Talk articles are some of our most specialized. They address any aspect of the technology nurses use in critical and acute care on a day-to-day basis, from informatics to devices and telemedicine to social media. This department helps nurses engage in lifelong learning with technological advancement to gain the competencies needed to provide care for diverse populations across the lifespan.
Finally, our shortest department, Pearls, always occupies just one page. These short stories describe dramatic, moving, or interesting personal experiences worth sharing with other critical care nurses. Your most challenging patient or complex case could inspire other critical care nurses, novice and veteran alike. On the job, new and valuable lessons are learned every day, and they’re not always clinical in nature. If you’ve got a great story, we want to hear about it!
Primed and ready
It may be easier than you think to get published and gain recognition among your peers. Many of our works are co-authored, and each submission is double-blind peer reviewed (reviewers of the manuscript will not know the identity of the author(s), and the author(s) will not know the identity of the reviewers) and carefully edited to ensure clinical accuracy and maximum impact. If you follow a few simple guidelines, Nursing2017 Critical Care will partner with you to contribute to and make a difference in the larger nursing conversation.
